There’s no shortage of rewards credit cards out there, and as more players enter the game, redemption opportunities are widening as well. But as Dan Frommer points out for Eater, redeeming your points for travel rewards is likely the best value.

You could spend hours every day calculating and valuing credit card rewards programs (and indeed, many people do—there’s a whole online industry dedicated to it) to figure out how to get the best deal possible.

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But as Frommer indicates, if you have a rewards card that’s not your basic cash-back card (basic = Capital One Savor*, for example, non-basic = Chase travel suite), you’re likely to get the most bang for your buck by cashing in your points for various travel deals, such as flights or hotels.

“Specifically, it’s usually the best deal to transfer your points to partner programs for things like business-class award flights and luxury hotel stays,” Frommer writes. “Where you might get one cent per point (or less!) in value doing cash-back statement credits, you can easily get twice as much value per point (or much more!) on luxury travel redemptions.”

Far too many consumers seem to take the easier route and redeem their hard-earned points at below-average values for things like merchandise and even poor cash-back propositions. If you do so, don’t blame yourself too much, though. Credit cards, airlines and hotels tend to make it easy to cash in your points for low-value items or redemptions for a reason: it’s cheaper for them.﻿

Spend your points on what you actually want

That said, the “best” value, over all, is to use your points for something you actually want, as Frommer writes in another piece in his newsletter, Points Party.

But a better way to measure the value of a points redemption is to consider the big picture: Are you getting what you want or need out of this? Because that’s ultimately what matters the most — and really the whole point of putting time and energy into this in the first place.

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Sure, mathematically the best value might be to use your points on a certain flight or in concert with another program, but if you don’t actually want to take that flight or stay at that hotel, it’s not really valuable. And if, for example, you’re not planning to travel anywhere but have a high credit card balance, earning a statement credit might make more sense for you. It’s all variable.

Points are never worth going into debt over. But with many rewards cards offering sign-up bonuses if you spend X in Y months, some people might dig themselves into a hole. “No amount of points is worth the cost of interest payments or the anxiety of feeling like you’re falling behind,” writes Frommer.